How Social Signals Influence Search Engine Rankings – Infographic

It seems like only yesterday when search engine optimization was something that could be largely gamed by ensuring the right keywords were in the right places on a page or post: something that semantic search and authorship have pretty much all but put pay to (thankfully!). Nowadays, things are a LOT more complicated, with about the only easy-to-understand SEO constant being the notion of gaining as many high-quality backlinks from similar sites as possible? Oh, wait, wasn’t there some recent news stating that the significance of backlinks gained from guest posting will now play a lot less of a role as an indicator of high-quality content?

Hmmm, so what is at the crux of SEO these days? Well, more than a few people now believe that a website’s position in the SERPs is largely indicated (at least initially) by social signals: i.e. the number of tweets, likes and +1s a post receives, etc – the evidence for which is becoming more and more compelling… as indicated by this rather awesome new animated infographic by Quick Sprout: